So, what is ECSA, exactly?

Recently there was a very good question on our slack:

It is understandable that the nature of ECSA is unlcear, since there are several entities involved, as well as two ambitious projects: GRAVITY, a blockchainless smart contracts computing architecture based on object capabilities, and SPACE, the end-user window to GRAVITY, making possible the creation of modular economic spaces. So let’s clarify a little and trace back the steps that have led here, because the history is a big part of the explanation of why ECSA looks like it does.

ECSA as a Multi-Organisational Entity

We see ECSA as a “Multi-Organisational Entity” or MOE. The idea of a MOE is that there are several organisations, possibly with different organisational structures (company, coop, network, trust, etc.), with at least a partially overlapping goal or goals that they have agreed to pursue. The organisations may have their own individual decision making systems, budgets and so on, but at regular intervals they come together to a Super-Board meeting, where as many as possible of the boards are represented at the same time, so that all the participant organisations can make decisions that take the whole MOE forward. Individuals can be members in several organisations of the MOE or just one. Each organization has its own function.

At the moment, the ECSA MOE consists of the following organisations:

The Econaut Partnership: a partnership between a few dozen individuals, consisting of the ECSA Core Team and Econauts (Econauts are next generation visionaries, architects, designers, engineers, inventors of economic space, who have also contributed crypto resources to the Partnership, thus providing seed funding for the project) — the Partnership runs our public slack for all interested parties

ECSA, Inc., a start-up whose purpose is to facilitate the development of SPACE, the platform for economic spaces

ECSA Network — which is basically a network of individuals around the Core Team — individuals not yet/anymore part of the Core Team but still working in contributing to development. Everyone in the network can choose the intensity and degree of their commitment, the door to the Core Team is open for everyone.

Robin Hood Coop — an activist hedge fund with the aim of democratising finance. It is the first economic space we engineered. And it made us realize that we have the power and imagination to reengineer finance.

So in terms of the original question, maybe ECSA can best be described as a collective of individuals with converging goals — and this collective has instituted the Econaut Partnership and the ECSA, Inc., as its tools towards those goals.

History

Historically, the oldest of these organisations is the Robin Hood Coop which was founded in 2012 in Helsinki, Finland. Based on the thought of leading heterodox economists, radical philosophers, artists and activists, Robin Hood was not instituted as a community of like-minded individuals doing affective labour in order to stay together, but rather as a “multitude” with a common vector: to explore and twist finance for the benefit of the many.

Robin Hood Coop

The coop taught many lessons. It showed how a coop of several hundreds of people can co-operate by using tools such as Loomio.org. It also clearly pointed to the limitations of the coop model. To be sustainable, the coop would have to have assets under management in the range of several millions; otherwise the labour needed for the running of the coop is voluntary and not remunerated. Then again, bootstrapping into that range is very hard with no marketing and PR. Decisions on project funding were made by a committee selected by a lottery. That was ok, but it would have been even better if individual members were able to route their support in a decentralized and autonomous way. Also the emerging distributed ledger technologies provided intriguing possibilities. How to make cooperation among many more automated and programmable? Another bottleneck has been the use of a single investment algorithm, called the Parasite. How to diversify into several algorithms, and, why not, how to bring in more ambitious instruments of synthetic finance, such as options?

These were the questions the coop set itself during 2014–2015. (A good analysis can be read in the Grey Paper from May 2015) As a result, it launched two projects. First, for the coop itself, it started a project towards moving its member and asset register into the Ethereum blockchain. The project has proven to be more ambitious and complicated than expected, and is still unfinished. Currently, the members and their shares are represented on the public chain, but a lot of fine-tuning needs still to be done before the coop can start taking new members. But we are almost there. We have also a lot of respect for the around 1000 members of the coop who are the first explorers of new economic space and have stuck with us through the difficult times.

ECSA Inc.

Second, individuals from the coop decided to set up a start-up company, which came to be called Economic Space Agency, Inc. The task of ECSA, Inc. is to bootstrap the vision of multidimensional and programmable economy for the many, and to find resources and partners for this work. In the year between the summers of 2016 and 2017, the Inc, developed a plan for a comprehensive Economic Space Platform (simply called SPACE), where groups and individuals can self-issue tokens embodying the economic logic and values that they desire. On SPACE, these economic spaces are interoperable, forming an ecosystem whose vitality is the ultimate goal of the ECSA vision. Our analysis is that smart contracts make possible the design of more longer term and more multidimensional P2P relational value space among people than just secure, verifiable, non-forgeable value transactions (a la Bitcoin).

Econaut Partnership

During spring 2017, ECSA, Inc. devised — with most crucial insights from its advisor Rafe Furst — a new kind of cooperation, a mix between a funding round and a process of co-design. A group of individuals saw the promise in building self-issuing and interoperable economic spaces and wanted to be parts of realising that vision, both in terms of designing the spaces that they themselves see as desirable and in financing the development in general. This is the idea of the Econaut Partnership, started in March. Here the individual Econauts — the first generation explorers of Economic Space — and the individuals of the Core Team agreed to put their efforts together in developing the SPACE platform and the first spear-heading Economic Spaces for it.

ECSA Network

During 2017, the ECSA vision has gathered quite a few individuals and organisations interested in its mission. Many of them have participated intermittently or more continuously in the development of SPACE and its underlying technology. From the early days of Robin Hood on, the work on ECSA has been charaterised by Open Source principles. Anyone can start contributing as a participant of the network. The value of the contributions is tracked. As in an open source software project, with deeper and longer contribution one can move inwards in the “onion” structure, and become a member of the Core Team. Currently, the system is that the Core Team votes on including new members to itself.

Current state

It has also become very clear that realising the full ambition of SPACE, as a secure, interoperable ecosystem of multi-valued economic spaces is not possible on top of existing blockchain technology. Since summer 2016, a part of the ECSA vision has been a computing secure, scalable, distributed architecture called GRAVITY, based on the object capabilities framework. Gravity forms a modular and resilient computing fabric that makes the modular and interoperable smart-contract defined economic spaces possible. With new developers coming to the core team during summer 2017 and other yet-to-be-public developments, the development of Gravity has taken rapid leaps in the past few months. As an open source project, the organizational structures around Gravity are forming as we speak. It seems that at least a foundation — like the foundations that many open source projects have — is needed to support and coordinate Gravity.

At the moment, there are ca. 25 individuals in the Core Team, with another 20 or so more in the network contributing to the development. During this year, the momentum has been gathering fast, and we are looking forward to a Token Generating Event for the joint Space/Gravity vision now very soon.

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